Recently I had some guests stay for a while, and while they were packing and cleaning this pen rolled out of a bedroom closet. I can’t find any identifying marks on the pen itself anywhere, and in fact it looks quite a bit different inside than any pen I have seen before (not that I have tons of experience)–it’s just a completely hollow tube made of very thin metal, with a friction-fit cap that holds a #773 R. Esterbrook & Co’s Natural Slant, also friction fit and with no reservoir to speak of.
The only information I can find on the nib is that the nib is possibly from around 1938, or at least that that model was being manufactured at the time (The Esterbrook Project).
The house where this was found was constructed in ~1939, and I have no idea how long the pen was hiding in the closet since we’ve cleaned it out several times before and it wasn’t even the first time this month that we had guests staying in that room. We’re also far from the first owners, though I found a penny from the 1940s when we did a demolition project in the garage so there are some artifacts from the early days of its life still hiding around!
Any pointers would be appreciated! I’m not sure what to call the raised vine and flower motif on the outside to help narrow my searches to try to find similar pens by blind luck.
The nib looks like the calligraphy nibs I’ve used in the past so if I had to say, it’s (like others have said) a dip pen. The friction-fit nib supports that, too, because you’d want to be able to change to different nib types for different fonts easily while still using the same nib holder, same as you do for calligraphy nib holders nowadays